Dow Jones & Company hosted on Wednesday of this week what I have to call a special treat. An intimate cast of leading technology brands and social media marketers gathered around an antique wooden conference room table in the Wall Street Journal’s former newspaper Board room to talk new media. How ironic. Here’s the video compliments of UStream (turn up the sound or get really close to the speakers),
and below my notes.
David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist, Keynote Speaker, and Author of the hit new book, World Wide Rave; Shel Israel, Best selling author of Naked Conversations and the upcoming book Twitterville; David Spark, Tech Journalist and Founder of Spark Media Solutions; and moderator Daniela Barbosa, Business Development Manager, Dow Jones, opened up the floor to discuss the new ways your employees, the outside world and future generations will communicate and collaborate using “social media.”
“How do you get started? How long does it take to get it right? How do you build a following?,” were a few of many questions Barbosa tossed at the panelists throughout the chat. The first thing is attitude, Meerman Scott responded. People get wound-up in the tools they have to be on. The four ways to generate attention for marketers, communicators or innovators are
1) you can buy
attention – advertising
2) beg for
attention – PR
3) you can bug
people – sales
4) social media - different because you get attention by putting yourself out there on the web and earn attention.
People are coming at social media with one of the other ways, not earning the attention, unfortunately.
Spark says the same thing. People ask for a video and want to know what it costs. Better to see whom the audience is and if the audience will want to consume a story in the video. His four steps are
1) assessment –
assess the situation – what do we have, who are the smart people in this room,
who are our customers / partners who are smart, where are our connections
2) harness that in
our editorial, create our own voice – not begging for attention – we’re being
seen as a peer for equal information
3) production –
instead of five videos, let’s create one video for multiple outputs and
4) social media is the distribution end – being on Twitter and Facebook is not understanding the business.
People may be talking about your business on a list serve, and no where else…
Israel disagrees with both.
He looks at it differently. Begin by listening and respond when you care to. Social media should not be approached to get a goal. It’s a “telephone,” communications tool. He takes the long view. People are pretty much the same. Earlier he was joking about killing a mastodon as being the dawn of social networking, getting others to collaborate over the shared need to carry away the heavy pieces of meat. One person (obviously) couldn’t do it alone.
What it (social media) does, Israel explains, that previous “social” technology didn’t do is let people interact very quickly, interact online as they do in “real life.” It’s a natural phenomenon that sometimes leads to conversations, sometimes not.
Are you thinking about your 15K followers when writing a Tweet? Israel has “milked the cow” of social media to get ideas for his next books. He’s asking questions to get answers. Israel wouldn’t get all of this help if he were not generous. If you want something, you have to give something that may not give back, he returns.
From a business perspective, how you can give to get, Meerman Scott retorts is, “If you’re interesting, people will want to follow you. If you have a bunch of people paying attention to what you’re saying or what you’re doing, it depends upon what you want to ultimately get.”
Social media is a cocktail party, Meerman Scott smirks. You can be a loud mouth salesperson, an advertiser pasting up banners all over the party, pay a PR person to talk about you, or have interesting conversations with people to see how you can help each other.
The topic is authenticity.
Do you let your PR person blog on behalf of the CEO? How do you get a salesforce into the conversation? Meerman Scott says to think about it, it’s how do you behave. When you’re thinking about guidelines, the lawyers are one viewpoint. You should listen to the janitors, secretaries, etc. as well. Take a look at IBM’s social computing guidelines – publicly available on the web to get a clue on how to do it right within your organization.
Divorce the media from the behavior of communication. How do you teach salespeople to use social media? Israel says not to push the tool on anyone. Salespeople typically need to use social media the least anyways because they are on the frontline, talking to customers all of the time. Social media’s greatest power is bringing that conversation into where it’s being discussed – outside the organization.
It really takes a key person to get the conversation going in social media, Spark says. “How do you teach it?,” Israel asks. What kind of conversation do you want to have? First start listening to the conversation that’s going on, then join in, if applicable. The experience always evolves from start to finish - when executives first start with social media, it never ends as the way it began.
You won’t believe the results you’ll have doing the tiniest things, Spark says. Meerman Scott says it needs to start with the people you’re trying to reach. You should have meetings with your potential customers, if they’re on social media and what they’re doing. Kids are on Facebook, salespeople listen to podcasts because they’re in their cars a lot. Organizations fail in social media efforts because they start from egotistical efforts – it’s all about what they have to offer when it shouldn’t be…
Israel disagrees and points out that it’s “less of an audience target sort of way.” You go where your (potential) customers can be found, does make sense, tipping his virtual hat to Meerman Scott. Though, Dell finds comments, where people say they suck. The first group that won’t change their mind is forgotten, but the others who say Dell sucks -for a reason - are responded to with thoughtful answers that solve those customers’ problems.
Frank Eliason started ComcastCares on Twitter. The brand damage was on YouTube, when the Comcast service person was video taped asleep on the job, but the social media marketing program went to Twitter because that’s where the Company (Frank) chose to connect with the customers. Type “Comcast sucks” into Google and there’s a quarter of a million responses, but there are more than half a million ComcastCares comments on Google too. There may be a group not in a place you think there is, Spark adds. The San Francisco comedians are not grouped together on Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else. They have their own private wiki.
And what’s the biggest barrier to social media - fear, fear of the unknown, fear of what the lawyers may say, Meerman Scott says. It does take time to do social media. Who’s going to do it? What kind of time is it going to take? But, it all comes back to fear. Spark adds that if you can’t get business done right now, work on this time to build your reputation. “Does the social media stuff get me business?,” he reflects. Prices for Spark’s services have gone up 200-300 percent since he improved his reputation through his own PR (and social media) efforts.
Quick aside from Terri Molini, Corporate Communications at Sun Microsystems:
You do have to provide your employees with guidelines and a direction to the platform. Companies also have to have a dialog with their employees so they don’t get afraid or get frustrated with the platforms, which leads to adoption of social media - teaching your employees to become empowered.
When a person does something inappropriate in social media, the community jumps on that person, before the lawyers do, because the community doesn’t want one person to screw it up for the rest, Israel adds. Social media is real life.
It’s ok to be a dork or screw up online too. Though, if you make a mistake, and if someone is really angry with you, let it go. It’s ok to make mistakes with social media. Spark covered this topic, the biggest mistakes made by social media gurus, at length on Mashable.
What should you write (blog) about?
Take inward facing information, that’s not proprietary, Spark says. People are looking for the information, and if you get it out there, non-proprietary info, then people will discover and make decisions on purchasing your product. Meerman Scott adds, never write about your own products.
Nobody cares about your products, they care about problems and answers to problems. Once when Meerman Scott blogged, he admitted, a simple blog post got thousands of hits and tons of comments, but when he talked about his new book, no one has responded.
Real estate agents are the worst - rather than talk about the 3 bedroom house on Twitter, they should talk about issues homeowners are facing, schools their prospective homebuyers should live near, etc. Blog posts are all about the houses. Why? Real estate agents should give their audiences give more value.
Social media makes conversations scalable, Israel says. ComcastCares reaches more people than all of the people in the call center. However, if you look at social media as a mass medium model, unless you’re Barack Obama, it’s not going to work for you. In the reverse, if you can collect information from Twitter streams and blogs, from live events - get the bodies in the locations that you want them to be, then you’re golden, Spark adds.
We don’t like
marketing messages, Israel repeats. If a person joins a conversation and yells
“buy my product,” the people in the room are gone, Meerman Scott adds. We like
being listened to. We do like people asking us what we think. Questions like
where do you live, what do you do? That is the natural evolution of a
conversation. As far as scale goes, Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “little things make
a big difference” and you can make a big impact doing little things with social
media.
